World of Warcraft Midnight is shaking things up when it comes to the regular gameplay loop and fan expectations of what is launched in a new expansion. Delves are here to stay, and world content is being supplemented with a new Prey system for end-game open-world content.
Alternatively, patch 12.0 is launching with three raids again instead of the previously expected one raid. Yet the biggest change is coming in the form of add-on support. As of World of Warcraft Midnight, combat-focused addons will be disabled for all end-game content. We got to chat with Dylan Barker, Lead Encounters Designer, and Noah Smith, Game Designer, to talk about how the development of WoW’s encounters has changed across the board in this simplified, add-on-less future of the 20+ year old MMO.
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Our conversation kicked off with a discussion of WoW’s most powerful aspect, its raids. As previously mentioned, World of Warcraft Midnight is launching with three raids. We haven’t seen an expansion launch with three raids since Mists of Pandaria. Why as we get ready for the second chapter of the Worldsoul Saga are they shaking things up? Per Dylan Barker, it came down to reading community conversations.
Barker stated, “We’ve noticed some folks in the public having a conversation about [expansion launches] feel a little formulaic. We started thinking about, ‘well, why would we want to have more than one location?’ And I think a lot of that spiraled into this is an opportunity to tell a story. You’ll hear a number of WoW developers talk about how Azeroth (the world World of Warcraft takes place on) itself is a character.”
He continued, “It felt like a natural, well, if we’re going to be a little bit less formulaic, this is a cool opportunity.’ It was one of those [ideas] where the story lined up with a good idea from very early on.”
Blizzard is aware of the burden to explain themselves and mechanics well in-game
Another uncertainty about the raids is how the new raids will be designed with the “no combat add-ons” future of the game. Encounters have grown increasingly complex to the point that add-ons feel almost necessary to tackle higher difficulty content.
That came from juggling and tracking add-ons, ensuring priorities are set up, and improving the visual clarity of the game beyond what WoW displayed to make impactful moments more readable. But most importantly, the approachability of the game was getting worse and worse from an end-game perspective. Per Barker, encounters are being approached a little differently to support players tackling content without combat addons.
Dylan Barker confirmed, “We’ve had to take into account from just building encounters a little bit differently. It’s also just an opportunity when we would build a puzzle in the past, that puzzle could be solved very quickly if it meant matching some strategy from outside the game to what the game was doing in that individual pull, using an add-on. In the future, we hope to tune the puzzle more closely around the puzzle itself, rather than having to resort to measures like making the puzzle complete quickly or triggering it while we’re firing dodgable attacks at you.”
He added, “So imagine, you know, if I tell you to do a puzzle with three elements, and instead we add a fourth that actually is difficult now, in a way that before would have just been solved by add-ons. So, in addition to just giving us as designers opportunities to give players encounters that feel somewhat different in a way that maybe we’ve forgotten about.”
“We’re also just aware of the burden that is now on us to explain ourselves and our mechanics well in game, and to sort of be aware of somewhat less capacity, as far as multitasking and tracking and coordination, stuff that has to now be done more out in the open, as opposed to through automation,” Smith said.
Trash philosophy has shifted to make more dangerous events more obvious
A change in visualization is very much needed. Fights in The War Within felt like a cluster of vomit on-screen. A mesmerizing vomit, but one that was difficult to read and understand quickly what the immediate priority was for the player.
Barker elaborated further on how the visualization of priorities is going to change in World of Warcraft Midnight and the future, from the perspective of trash in instances. “I might actually use this as an opportunity to talk about dungeon trash. Because when people are playing Mythic Plus and you’re running dungeons, the trash is like a disproportionately large section of your brain. You have to know a lot about what each creature does, and some of them, the thing they do doesn’t become a problem until a keystone level where it suddenly is the problem.”
He continued, “I look at our trash philosophy as having shifted to make the things that are happening that are going to be dangerous more obvious and have this space that they’re operating and be a little bit less contested. And I’m careful to say we’re not necessarily doing less in every place, but we’re making the things that we are doing more visually apparent through a bunch of different techniques.”
Dylan Barker provided further details about the new techniques being introduced. “Overall, fewer cast bars, making things happen a little bit more directly. If something would cast, and then another effect would happen, and then a dot would stick on you, we might just make that just cast a dot.”
“Simplification of that sort of thing, When you walk up to a pack, you can identify that’s the mean guy in that pack. I want to as a dungeon maker, have fewer of them, but place them strategically so that players know what they’re getting into when they see that one mob. We want to get to the point where more often than not, the creature that is the scary one is a little bit less frequent and very clear as to which one it is.”
Prey keeps multiplayer fidelity while balancing rewards with its difficulty options
Moving on to the topic of WoW’s newest open-world feature, Prey. Prey is a new end-game system that lets players hunt down dangerous creatures over the course of a hunt while doing outdoor content, like world quests. Yet, up to this point, the overall impact of Prey and how it will fit into the end-game cycle hasn’t been clear, especially from a time-sink perspective.
Wasting time on a task that yields no reward is always frustrating. Whether it be from expiring time, running out of lives, or feeling like you’ve hit a brick wall in terms of difficulty that is insurmountable at this time. Noah Smith spoke to the inherent friction of the system.
Noah Smith stated, “The core concept of getting ambushed is something that players aren’t really used to dealing with in an outdoor world. We want to be able to give you something fun to reward and express that skill-based challenge that you are at or exceeding, which is why we’re leveraging three different difficulties for prey. You have normal mode, you have hard mode, and you have nightmare mode, and we are keeping multiplayer fidelity intact throughout all of them.”
Noah Smith went into more detail about how multiplayer fidelity is still being maintained. “In normal mode, when you find your guy wherever he is in the zone, you and however many you know, random people are around, can all jump in, tag team, and kill [the target] as easily as possible. On hard mode and nightmare mode, we’re still allowing you to group up.”
He continued, “But we’re saying to maintain the fidelity and the kind of skill expression that we’re asking players to accomplish in the later sections of those hunts, you’ll only be able to fight your final encounter as a party. That is really to maintain both the narrative framing of prey. But also if I spend 10 to 15 minutes getting to a final encounter, it’s too difficult, and I’m just throwing myself against that wall, I jump in guilt chat. I say, ‘Hey, is anyone on can you help me with this? Can you jump in real quick?”
Prey is an overlay system to supplement open-world content
In other words, there is no limitation to prey about when you can party up. You can get assistance to finish a hunt without having to restart. Similarly, we discussed the length of a typical Prey mission. According to Smith, they will be about as long as the current delves. He stated, “We’re looking for about that kind of 10 to 15 minute sweet spot with some gulfs on either side to account for the fact that we want it to feel less like a series of check marks to get to where your guy is, and more like an ongoing push and pull, hunt and be hunted, kind of a cat and mouse game.”
Barker and Smith both clarified that Prey isn’t a dedicated activity, like delves. They can be completed while doing other things. he clarified, “We designed prey from the bottom up to be an overlay system that you can do while you’re doing your other things in the zone. So while you are doing your other normal world quests and your treasures and your rares, you can also do that while actively engaging with the prey system in a way that makes it all a little bit more, you know, engaging, or much more, you know, difficult. Still, it’s very much meant to be in concert.”
Finally, we talked about how the loop of Prey will work and how its rewards will work out. From the reveal, we learned that Prey will be a part of the Outdoor rewards in The Great Vault, even though it was pitched as a cosmetic-reward-only feature. Now that we are approaching alpha, the exact rewards are still getting ironed out. Noah Smith confirmed, “We are tying it into the great vault. We will be looking, and once again, we’re roughly filling this out at the hero level on a certain cadence that we’re still playing with internally.”
Smith elaborated further on how the cadence will evolve as they confirm the finer details. “One thing we’re very sensitive to is the idea that Prey, being an opt-in system, there should be no borrowed power here. There shouldn’t be anything mechanically that Prey gives you that you can’t get from anywhere else.”
“But we do want it to be a highly incentivized supplement to the outdoor loop that Delves are currently a part of. We’re looking at increasing the cadence as you engage more with the system, and making it so you don’t feel like you have to grind this from the outset to get a Best-in-Slot,” he said.
Prey hunts will take about 10-15 minutes each
He finished by clarifying that Prey will not require completion of delves to help reach a target. “We didn’t want the player to feel like you have to do Prey to then participate in the Delve system and vice versa. If you love delves and the outdoor world isn’t for you, you know that’s totally fine. If you love prey and you want to accent your Delve loop in the week, that’s totally an option. We just never wanted the player to feel like we are forcing them to engage with the Prey system.”
As for starting a new Prey hunt, similarly to Delves, you’ll need to travel back to Silvermoon to start a new one once you finish one up while out in the open world. Noah Smith stated that they want to make Prey feel narratively tied to Astalor in Silvermoon.
“We did feel like we wanted to maintain the narrative trappings of like you are working with Astalor to go find targets. And right now, traversal is a big part of it. We’re still sussing out a lot of the gameplay feel and how it feels in general to move around the zones of World of Warcraft Midnight. But we didn’t want prey to be a UI element that you click and then you’re in it, and then you’re done,” Noah Smith said.
We are still very early on in the alpha cycle, and after playing a couple of hours the past several days, dungeons particularly feel more inviting. With new baked-in add-ons like the boss encounter timeline, fights are overall more easy to understand from the jump. Time will tell, though, if that stays true as we get closer to seeing what the endgame truly looks like in Midnight.
World of Warcraft Midnight is coming to PC and Mac in 2026.
